Bodies unearthed

In economics, the term extraction refers to the act of drawing from the earth or from a living being a material, a resource (coal, silica, latex, data…) for purposes of value or use. In genealogy, the term refers to the act of tracing back a lineage, bringing to light a familial or social origin often concealed by time, silences, losses, and forgetting. Yet genealogical extraction can also reenact the violence of economic extraction when it draws from memory a form of commercial profit or a power of symbolic domination. With caution, then, I venture along the traces of an ancestor who has linked my life, directly and indirectly, to a plant called Hevea and to the consequences of its exploitation.

Born in 1860, P. came from a family rooted in the bourgeoisie since the 16th century, connected to the upper spheres of the royal monarchy in the 17th and 18th centuries as suppliers to the army, bankers, and financiers. In what might seem like a predetermined path, he in turn became a banker, as well as an industrialist, a lawyer, and a centre-left member of parliament under the Third French Republic. On the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, then known as Saigon, he developed the rubber production and trade sector, managing several Hevea plantations and processing factories, presiding over the Cochinchina Rubber Planters’ Union, and investing in the large multinational companies that came to dominate the market from the 1920s onward. His lineage bears witness to the gradual rise of the merchant and bourgeois class from the 16th century to its culmination with the advent of the industrial era, as well as to the intrinsic ties it has woven with processes of colonization and the exploitation of natural resources.

Flesh Fertilizer

At the end of the 1880s, France controlled what are now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which it collectively called French Indochina. This colony was considered the jewel of the French empire, it was the richest and most populated colony, from which were exported minerals, rubber, and rice. The colonization of this territory by the French empire lasted nearly a century, from the first military expedition led by the Second Empire under Napoleon III in 1858, until the Geneva Accords in 1954, after years of armed struggle that sealed the independence of the Indochinese countries. The champions of this colonial project justified it through their supposed enduring responsibility to “civilize” the peoples of Southeast Asia. In reality, French colonialism in Vietnam was primarily driven by economic motivations, such as access to raw materials and a cheap labor force enabling profit. French authorities and companies transformed Vietnam’s thriving subsistence economy into a proto-capitalist system based on land ownership, mass production, exports, and low wages. Planters settled on lands considered “virgin,” organizing the conquered space according to a logic of maximal control over both territory and people. Initiated by settlers who often had other professional occupations, the cultivation of rubber trees quickly became the domain of a few large groups. These groups went on to form the first major multinational corporations, laying the foundations of an economic imperialism that continues to this day.

White Gold

Many trees and plants have developed natural latex as a defense against insects. The first known human use of latex dates back to 1600 BCE, when the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, often referred to as the “people of latex”, used the tree’s milky sap for both ritual purposes (game balls) and practical uses (rudimentary rain capes and jackets, waterproof shoes, or applied to the bodies of newborns to keep them warm). By the late 19th century, European empires had widely expanded the exploitation of Hevea brasiliensis in order to extract its latex in large quantities through industrial processes. Initially concentrated in the Amazon, where the plant originates, plantations were relocated to tropical regions colonized by European empires, in a context of intense economic competition. It was in this context that vast colonial plantations emerged in South America, Asia, and Africa. As symbol of both modernity and oppression, rubber thus became one of the world’s most important commodities. It permeates our daily lives, insulating and extending our bodies on multiple levels. It can be found, for example, in plane, truck, car and bicycle tires, condoms, medical and safety equipment, as well as in many other everyday objects.

Earth Burnout

Since the 1980s, Vietnam, like other Southeast Asian countries, has undergone one of the most extensive and rapid landscape transformations in human history, with its natural tropical forests being converted on a massive scale into monoculture rubber plantations. This swift expansion, driven by strong global demand for natural rubber for tire production, is partly explained by the fact that, despite advances in synthetic rubber, certain essential tire properties (elasticity, resistance, structural integrity) still rely heavily on natural rubber. This transformation has profoundly altered local ecosystems and ways of life, reflecting both global economic dynamics and severe regional environmental impacts. This ever-increasing intensity of exploitation exposes us to the risk of global disruption. Plantations are increasingly threatened by Microcyclus ulei, a fungus that has already devastated plantations in South America. Rapid and frequent global movement facilitates its spread, endangering trees already weakened by soil depletion and genetic cloning, which makes them uniformly vulnerable to infection.